Grave
by MatildaMavis
Summary: Edward left Bella on her birthday...and never returned. In fact, he hasn't seen her in a decade. But when tragedy strikes her family, he runs back to her side and finds that it isn't at all what he expected. One-shot EPOV angst-fest.


Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight. Don't sue me.

* * *

I couldn't tell her that I loved her. I wanted to, every day. Find a phone or a computer or a goddamned skywriter and tell her that she was the only thing that had mattered at all in 119 years. The words felt like they were permanently in my throat, shredding it from the inside and threatening to surge up and cut their way out of my sealed lips.

But I left her for a reason, and I had stayed gone. For ten years, I'd roamed the world. I'd hiked through remote jungles, miles from another human. I'd climbed the world's highest mountains and forced myself to stay there as my skin froze and cracked open, as my hunger burned until it was so intensely painful that it almost forced the agony of being away from her out of my body. I'd tied myself to boulders and tossed them into the sea, spending weeks twisting in the currents of the dark depths and listening to the mournful cry of whale calls. I'd read somewhere that they could communicate with each other through sonic vibrations across great distances, and I wanted to imagine that my connection with Bella would work the same way. That despite the time and space between us, she could feel some invisible pulse in her chest, tying her to me.

Eventually, I always pulled myself up onto some unknown beach with a belly full of shark blood and coated in crystals of dried salt water. Then I'd buy a phone to check in with my only connection from my old life. That's how, somewhere on the Italian coast, listening to squealing pre-teens stuffing themselves with gelato from the shop next door, Alice called me home. "She's going to need you, Edward."

Charlie Swan had been on a routine traffic stop late one night when a passing motorist lost control. The SUV slid into the car he had pulled over, pinning Charlie's body between them and virtually severing him in half. The funeral was in three days.

I hadn't been in North America in a decade, afraid to allow myself to even share a continent with Bella. But there was no question that I would be at her father's grave, ready to throw myself between her and the abyss of despair that I was afraid she would try to dive into. I bought a train ticket to Rome, a plane ticket to Seattle, and handed my phone to one of the squealing girls.

I bought another one when I reached the states and didn't bother to send the number to anyone. Alice would know it anyway. And on the ferry from Seattle, with the brown autumn woods of the Olympic peninsula within my sight, it rang. Esme, of course.

"Alice told me you were coming home."

I nodded, trusting her ability to understand my silence more than I trusted my own voice. She did, of course.

"She moved on, Edward. She married Jacob Black. They have a daughter, and they're doing fine."

Alice had been my only link to home in ten years, and she'd never bothered to tell me. Probably because she could see the future where I heard this news and it felt like molten lava poured down my throat, setting my organs on fire and hollowing me out until there was nothing but this hard, pale shell.

My teeth ground together, venom pooling at the back of my throat like bile. I managed to mutter, "Good."

Bella was happy. She had a family, she was alive, she was safe. It was everything I'd ever wanted for her. My plan had worked; I'd never felt like a bigger failure.

"I just wanted to warn you," Esme said, so softly that even with vampire senses, I almost couldn't hear her. "Prepare you, before it was too late for you to turn around."

The ferry had pulled into the harbor, car engines starting and driving from the boat across the dock. My eyes traced the path of an old, dark sedan that reminded me of the Volvo I owned in another life. One where I drove these roads every day and naively believed in a future with the woman I loved.

The car disappeared into the tree line and I choked back my memories of the past. "I have to see her." My voice was hoarse from disuse and the mental image of Jacob's hands, mouth, _body_ on the only woman I would ever love.

Esme was silent for a long time. I could hear, in the staticky silence of the line, the once-familiar sounds of home. Carlisle clearing his throat, Rose's voice, tart and impatient, followed by Emmett's booming laugh. It made me ache around the edges, longing for the time when it was just us, just my family, when I thought I was happy because I didn't know what happiness really was.

My fingers traced across my lips, remembering the way Bella's had felt against them. My throat burned with thirst at the memory of her scent, the burning knife of memory piercing my chest and twisting. A part of me wanted to crush my arms around the nearest car and jump off the ferry, forcing myself back into the dark waves.

But it was too late. I was already mentally following the road from the dock, across the wooded wilderness and into Forks. I could picture the exact way her hair shined under the rare Washington sunlight, the way her teeth sank into her bottom lip when she was trying to figure something out. I couldn't be this close without seeing her, smelling her, sensing her again.

I forced myself to walk down to the bottom floor of the ferry at human pace. "I'll see you soon, Esme." Folding the pre-paid cell into my jacket pocket and raising the hood over my head, I slipped off the boat and out into the woods. I ran the whole way home, the stench of wolves so thick in the air that I chose not to breathe.

* * *

My room was the way it had always been, with one exception – a perfectly tailored black suit, made of a material that slid against my skin like liquid, hung from the curtain rod where I would be sure to see it. I lay on my couch and stared at it, an empty silhouette against the fading sunlight, until long after the night set in. Every memory I'd fought so desperately to repress, every ghost of her touch and echo of her words seemed to live on in the air of this room, pressing against my skin as warm and immediate as the were when she was lying here beside me. I was drowning in memories, choking on them, and happier than I'd been since the day I'd left.

The night and day passed; I hadn't moved. The door eased open, Carlisle's shining blond head slipping into the empty space.

"It's time."

I rose and dressed, still lost in my memories as I drifted behind my family to the garage. Alice wrapped her tiny hand around my wrist and led me off to her favorite sports car, one that could only hold the two of us. She was thinking that I could use the space and quiet.

I murmured my thanks and slid into the passenger's seat, the heels of my palms pressed hard against my closed eyes. The pressure blacked out my vision and burned ghost images of the last light I'd seen into my retinas, the pale lines dancing and sliding against one another until they re-formed into the curves of Bella's smile, the tiny sparks at the back of her eyes.

I stayed that way as the car lurched and turned beneath me, until it was still and quiet again and Alice had slid the keys into my coat pocket. As she opened the car door I saw a sliver of the thoughts she was fighting to hide from me. A vision of Bella's hand, adorned with a modest diamond and thin gold band, sliding out of my grasp as the sun rose, pale and golden on the cemetery's horizon.

* * *

We were the first ones to the grave, my siblings passing like wan wraiths among the headstones. The sun had slid down beneath the nearly bare trees, the dead autumn leaves crunching beneath our shoes as we gathered by the freshly turned earth.

Others drifted in, slowly, once-familiar faces now aged and bloated, making uncomfortable small talk and tugging at cheap suits that were bought ten pounds earlier and pulled at the buttons.

The wolves arrived, fittingly enough, in a pack. They formed a cluster standing behind the row of empty chairs across from my family, sneers on their still-youthful faces.

Across the graveyard, a car door closed. The wind shifted, and there she was. The smell of her, so rich and layered and _close_. I knew exactly where I'd be able to see her first, just at the crest of a hill where she would walk around a large marble weeping angel. Jasper's soothing waves of calm broke against me, completely ineffective.

I heard her family's thoughts before I saw them. Confused, sorrowful images of Charlie, older than I had ever seen him, from the distorted perspective of a chubby little girl with gleaming black hair and Bella's round eyes. The quiet comfort of Bella, her mind a mystery to me but her physical presence screaming through my veins. And the long string of expletives ricocheting around Jacob's skull as he smelled my family. The pack had warned him that we were there, but a piece of him had wished that they were wrong somehow. That he wouldn't have to deal with his most hated enemy the same day that he buried his beloved father-in-law.

I heard their footsteps on the dry, browning grass, drawing tantalizingly close. The last rays of sunlight shot like spotlights through the cloud cover; Bella stepped out from behind the angel's wing.

She was as beautiful as I remembered, creamy skin, full lips, shining hair twisted demurely on the back of her head. She seemed more solid than I remembered, her body curving in new places to accommodate the weight motherhood had given her. Despite the solemn setting, the child's hand in hers, and the piercing stare of her husband beside her, I pictured myself rucking Bella's black dress up to her neck and tracing my fingertips over every new swell and dip, learning her body like a piano and playing it until she screamed a crescendo of my name.

I shifted slightly to hide my lower body behind Rose and the movement caught Bella's attention. Sort of, anyway. Her eyes flitted across my whole family, sliding right over me without seeming to register that I was there.

I was used to being dead - I'd been dead over a century longer than I'd been alive. But I'd never been invisible, like my body had decayed to dust long ago and I was nothing more than a spirit writhing in the wind, stubbornly refusing to believe that the living had left me behind.

The three of them took their seats at the graveside and the priest began to speak. The ceremony was over in an instant for me, only flashes registering. The officers in their dress blues, trying to make sense out of a tragic accident while deliriously grateful that they weren't the one in the ground. Bella's daughter's silent tears soaking into Jacob's suit coat as she buried her face in his shoulder. Rose sliding her hand into mine with a comforting squeeze.

I was sharing air with Bella again, the smell and sound taste of her on the wind the only thing I could focus on.

Later, with Charlie laid to rest and no one in the graveyard but the Black family and myself, Bella finally stood. She smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt and bent to whisper in her husband's ear. She didn't want me to hear anything, her lips barely allowing air to pass. But he understood.

Jacob stared at me, his mind focused on a graphic fantasy of his pack hunting me down and tearing my body limb from limb, but he didn't say anything. He was a man now, mature enough to trust his wife, to take his daughter's tiny hand and lead her out of the graveyard with promises of ice cream. To leave Bella to shovel the earth over the cold remains of her past.

She walked around Charlie's grave, trailing her hand over the marble headstone as she made her way to me.

"I'm so sorry," I murmured, sounding pathetic. They hadn't found words that could say what I really felt.

Bella nodded, her eyes skittering from mine to the mound of dirt before us. "Thanks. He was a great man."

I knew I shouldn't do it, that it was inappropriate for a thousand different reasons, but I couldn't stop. I reached out and wrapped my hand around her shoulder, feeling the thin bones of her arm as I traced my hand down the length of it to tangle my fingers with hers. I'd forgotten how warm humans were, how soft and pliable she felt under my grasp, how electric her energy burned when my skin was on hers.

She didn't pull away. Her eyes drifted closed and she sighed softly, leaning ever so slightly closer to me. Joy exploded in my chest like a firework, raining sparks across my body.

It made me brave enough to continue on. "I didn't mean I was sorry just about Charlie."

She swallowed, the sound louder in my ears than in her own. "There's nothing else to be sorry for, Edward." Her voice strained to say my name, as if it physically hurt her to form the sound.

But this older Bella was strong; she kept on. "Things weren't great, after you left. I did a lot of stupid things, as if putting myself in danger would somehow bring you back to me. Jake caught me trying to jump off a cliff once. He put himself between my body and the edge and he fell off instead.

"So I tried quieter, lonelier risks. There were a lot of drugs, a lot of inappropriate men. A lot of painful, damaging decisions." She looked up at me, the defiance she spoke of still shining in her eyes. "Jake waited through all of it. For three years, he was there to pick me up, clean up my messes, and try to put me back together. And then I realized that he was a good man. A better man, even, because he did the thing that mattered most. He _stayed,_ Edward."

I don't know what I had expected to find here. Bella still pining for me, full of dramatic declarations of undying love. Or maybe even that she really had moved on and made herself happy without me. I never expected to find such anger. Her hand in mine had tightened so much that her fingernails had bent back in on themselves, cracking against the stone of my skin.

"So you don't get to come back here now, when I just lost one of the only men who has really loved me, and try to tell me that you're sorry."

I nodded, tightly, and fought to hold my tears until later. "I'll go."

"Didn't you hear anything I just said?" Her voice rose in frustration, echoing across the open space and bouncing back to us off of mausoleums. "I've had enough pain from people leaving me. It's taken a lot of time and therapy to understand that it's important to me that people stay. I just lost my father, I don't want to lose someone else right now."

She was crying again, her cheeks flushed from letting me see her so weakened. I pulled her to me and wrapped my arms around her back, drinking in deep breaths of her scent and battling back the raw, aching burn of my thirst for her. "I'm here. I don't know what you want from me, but whatever it is, it's yours."

She was quiet for a long moment, calming herself enough to be able to speak. "I want to stay here with him tonight. With Charlie. I don't want him to have to spend his first night in this new place alone." Bella pulled back and looked up at me, her face as broken and vulnerable as it had been the last time I'd seen her. "Will you sit with me?"

I let her go long enough to take off my coat and spread it on ground behind her. She smiled, a faint echo of the smile I remembered, and sat. I settled myself beside her, unsure of what to do, so she linked her arm through mine and rested her head on my shoulder.

We didn't speak. There was too much to say and no logical reason to say it. The reasons I'd left hadn't changed, and now she had reasons to keep me away in the form of her husband and child. So we just sat in the graveyard, listening to the sounds of the night, and held a wake for the things that might have been.

Hours passed. We stretched out on the grass and dozed until the sun grew tantalizingly close to rising. Those last few seconds before dawn felt like my last chance, one moment to do or say something in the secretive dark. I couldn't stop fantasizing about doing all the things I'd restrained myself from doing before. Of ripping Bella's clothes from her body, dragging my mouth over every salty inch of her hot flesh, and vibrating my tongue over the center of her until she fell apart, screaming and shaking in my hands. Of wrapping her in my arms and running away over the mountains or locking her in Alice's car, driving until we hit the Atlantic and leaving the life she'd built without me behind forever.

There in the grass, Bella's head was resting on my chest in the space that had always seemed to have been carved out just for her. As the sky turned a deep purple she rolled toward me, her body partially trapping mine beneath it. Her heat seared across my skin like a lightning strike, rare and deadly. I know, in that moment, that she was imagining the same secret fantasies. I could see it, sliding guiltily at the back of her eyes. The dark desire to let me do with her as I wished, to try to resurrect the girl I'd killed on her eighteenth birthday and forget everything that had come after.

The moment stretched out, nervous tension sparking the air surrounding us as we contemplated doing the impossible. Then the sun crested on the horizon, shattering the magic of the night. Bella's gaze shifted away to the distance behind her and she sat up, her fingers nervously twisting a piece of her hair that had fallen down back behind her ear. Smoothing everything over, putting order back into her world.

"I should go. Jake will be worried."

It was true and it was simple and it was hideous. We'd been apart ten times longer than we'd been together, but this was the real end. I'd broken something that I couldn't put back together and I'd seen the evidence. I couldn't throw myself into the ocean and pretend that she could hear my love across the distance. She was too busy listening to the love in her own home.

I'd seen this moment in Alice's vision in the car. The last time that I would touch Bella. The early light of dawn shone pale through the mist as her hand slid out of mine and she stood, squaring her shoulders to face another day with the second greatest love of her life. The life I'd forced her to live.

I watched, numb, as she walked back across the graves, her car keys chiming as they swung from her hand. The sunlight framed her head as it slipped over the hill, hiding her from my sight.

She never looked back.


End file.
